What helped me was two things, tweetdeck, while it is not perfect I visually got it once I saw it in that application-two in several of my mastermind groups we put together a forum we all of us members could easily follow each other if we wanted to be being able to find all the twitter addresses in ONE place on our shared site.

Now how simple was that? it made all the difference in the world for me to “get it” and in playing in tweet land for a bit I started to build “real” relationships and found myself in ten days with four strategic partnerships that felt good and will increase all of our incomes in 2009 by leveraging our relationships as well as serving our clients better.

Woot! ( common expression in twitter of cool!)

Patience is a good thing in social media.

Chris & Connie – thanks for checking in!

Amy & Jennifer – glad you find Twitter Packs helpful.

I think people need to remember that Chris created this to help newcomers to Twitter, not experienced users. The experienced people seem to be the ones complaining; I haven’t come across any new users knocking the idea yet (although I’m willing to stand corrected on that).

Still interested to find out: what approaches worked for you when you all started?

I think the wisest suggest you make is “guideline, not rulebook.” I’m discerning enough to go through the list of suggested pack people one by one to determine if their content is worth reading. What’s the difference between a Twitter Pack and leveraging, say, the interest or regional search on sites like Facebook and MySpace? I don’t think it’s that different.

So once again, my thanks to Chris on behalf of all of the somewhat newbies for taking the time to develop the concept. And thanks to you for realizing the flaws, but also doing your part to try to make Twitter Packs useful to the community at large.

Cheers,
Connie